Intel announces full set of new Atom and Xeon server processors to fend off ARM

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Intel has taken the wraps off its next generation of server hardware at IDF Beijing. The company is pushing a new range of Atom, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell parts across the market. The new chips emphasize power efficiency at every level, but much of Intel’s focus is on the upcoming Atom hardware.

The chips

Intel is previewing multiple new products. The Atom Briarwood core (32nm) is already on the market — HP’s Project Moonshot is based on this processor — but Avoton and Rangely are new high-efficiency parts launching in the latter half of the year. The new Xeon E3 series will be based on Haswell, while the E7 family will upgrade to what Intel calls Ivy Bridge EX.

Here’s the same data, but with an expanded view of what Intel views as the most important features of each product segment.

The current Atom S1200 processors are dual-core chips that can address up to 8GB of RAM (competing solutions from ARM vendors like Calxeda are limited to 4GB) and support up to 8x PCIe 2.0 lanes. ARM-based products are an emerging threat to Intel’s dominance in the server market, and the company has focused significant resources on scaling up 32nm Atom products to meet the challenge in early 2013, as well as prepping Avoton hardware (based on Atom’s next-generation 22nm core) for later this year.

Performance details on the next-generation Atom core continue to be scarce; Intel claims a 50% improvement over previous-generation Atom processors. Thanks to a recently published side-by-side photo of the current S1200 and upcoming Avoton, however, we can draw some conclusions about die size.

Avoton on the left, S1200 on the right

We can use Photoshop to examine the die sizes in pixels — Intel’s published guidelines for the S1200 indicate a nominal die size of 9.86mm x 10mm. The S1200 die in the photograph is 34×35 pixels. The Avoton die is 33×30 pixels. This implies that Intel was able to substantially beef up Atom (and double the number of cores on-die) while still decreasing die size.

The new Haswell Xeons will hit TDPs as low as 13W. That’s a substantial reduction over current E3 chips, which bottom out at 17W. Finally, at the end of the year, there’s the Xeon’s E7 family, built on Ivy Bridge EX. Despite rumors that the chips could include up to 15 cores, Intel is only talking about 10-core variants today, with support for up to 4TB of memory, but the same 30MB L3 cache and 144 lanes of PCIe 2.0 as previous products in this range. That’s a huge leap from the current E7500 I/O Hub, which offers just 36 PCIe 2.0 lanes.

The goal of these endeavors is to establish Intel as the unquestioned market leader in the face of ARM’s challenge at the low end. The advances at the upper end of the market are relatively small in comparison to the full court press Chipzilla is putting out for its upcoming Atom products.

For now, Santa Clara’s advances in manufacturing technology, vendor relationships, software development, and platform features are going to keep ARM competitors limited to a relative handful of wins. The really interesting question is whether or not that’ll change late this year or early next, when Cortex-A15 parts begin to hit the market (See: ARM Cortex-A15 explained: Intel’s Atom is down, but not out.) By the time that happens, Avoton will be ready to meet them — and we’ll see if ARM can play in the wider server market.

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Intel wasted way too much time fighting the gigahertz/MIPS war with AMD all while ignoring (or failing to recognize) a much bigger threat from ARM.

some_guy_said

Gigahertz war? Intel got tanked early after 2000 because AMD soundly debunked the gigahertz myth. I don’t think gigahertz is a good term to describe that battle.

During that time, Intel actually licensed ARM designs and was the premier mobile chip manufacturer.

It was when intel dropped ARM designs that they fell behind in the mobile market.

There’s a simple dichotomy that’s going on here. x86 (A performance instruction set) cannot in any way directly compete on the same playing field as the ARM RISC (A reduced instruction set). It takes a higher baseline power to process anything on the x86 instruction set.

Intel is fighting a stupid uphill battle against ARM in the mobile space. The only reason that they’re making progress at all is due to the extreme advantage intel has in the manufacturing process compared to anyone and everyone. It’s a miracle that the Atom can compete at all.

If Intel still manufactured ARM chips, they’d be twice as fast, and twice as power efficient as any other ARM chip on the market.

chojin999

You have no clue what you are talking about. AT ALL.

x86/x64 has not been classic CISC since many years ago. It’s a so called CRISC.

And the Centrino architecture on which all current Intel CPUs are based on is the most efficient to date.

Only IBM with its PowerPC and Power CPUs can both match and deliver better designs than Intel.

I don’t get if telling wonders about ARM is fashionable these days or there are ARM employees on the ‘net telling so but it’s just not true.

ARM has been the leader on very low power mobile and embedded for years but they only sell main designs that then OEMs can customize at will. They don’t have their own factories. Nor they have advanced R&D materials and devices groups and such that both IBM and Intel have.

On desktop, notebook, servers and high-end super computers ARM won’t have a chance at this rate to even remotely match Intel for the next 10 years or so unless they managed to buy AMD or IBM maybe.

ARM has Nvidia, which looks set to extend ARM’s instruction set to reach PCs and HPCs.

some_guy_said

“CRISC” is not an official term, because it is oxymoronic (In IT, CRISC stands for something completely different – Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control). You are unclear on the concept.

Just because intel eliminated some of the bloat in no way makes the instruction set a RISC.

The modern x86 and x86-64 (And variations) instruction sets are some of the most complex available. Just because they’re less complex than they were 5-10 years ago does not make them RISC.

Over the years, many extensions have been added to the original 8086 instruction set, many of which are still part of the atom and haswell architectures – MMX, 3Dnow, SSE, x87, etc…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86

So clearly, you do not know what you are talking about when it comes to instruction set complexity.

Intel processors do about the same amount of work per watt as ARM, Intel processors may use may power but they are also doing a lot more work while they are using more power. ARM can not achieve Intel performance without increasing power usage as well.

Neither Intel or Arm are immune to hitting a wall on power- performance. When you look at the power usage on the Arm A15 you can see what happens to the power consumption on ARM as the performance increases. This has long been a myth that ARM could just keep the same power consumption and just keep increasing performance without it ever affecting power use.

Until fairly recently Intel didn’t give a crap about how much power their processors consumed. As soon as they started taking power consumption seriously, their power consumption started seriously dropping. And they are nowhere near finished getting the power down. ARM is not going to achieve the same raw performance of Haswell processors without using some more power. And the A15 processor demonstrates that. Look at the power consumption tests Anantech did on an Atom, Krait and an A15.

Intel also just recently started taking Atom development seriously. And Intel’s Gigahertz war was in the Pentium 4 days, that failed experiment ended long ago.

some_guy_said

“Intel processors do about the same amount of work per watt as ARM”

I’m not sure that this statement is entirely accurate. Under IDEAL conditions, intel processors can be competitive with performance per watt against ARM.

However, intel suffers when it comes to idle, or especially low load (Non-idle) power usage compared to ARM.

But you’re right about ARM trying to scale up performance and losing it’s advantages.

Intel’s ace up its sleeve is it’s huge manufacturing advantage over everyone else.

actionjksn

“However, intel suffers when it comes to idle, or especially low load (Non-idle) power usage compared to ARM.”

You’re right about that, and low idle power consumption and low load is one of the areas where ARM shines. But this is specifically one of the issues that Intel is working at addressing. I would think that decreasing power use under load would be more difficult for Intel to fix than the idle and near idle power consumption.

They need to make them able to use nearly nothing while idle and to also insure that their processors only run as fast as they need to in order to complete any given task. And to always scale down power consumption accordingly. This should be possible and since most portable computing devices are usually not hammering the processor, at least not for extended periods of time. For instance even when my older Core i5 ThinkPad has a bunch of tabs open with sometimes two browsers at a time and a media player running and whatever else, my processor usage will usually stay well below 10%, other than a brief spike when I first click something and even dip down to low single digits. I’m averaging 5% right now with 15 tabs open. If they could make the power consumption scale down accordingly then the processor should use only three to six watts. Those numbers are just a guesstimate but you see what I mean.

From what I’ve read Intel is working on this now. Intel will need to accomplish this if they want to compete in the mobile sector, and for smaller devices they will need to get the power down even lower. If they had made this a priority years earlier they would probably already be there.

I love my Qualcom krait processor in my smartphone and its computing power is impressive for what it is. But this is not what I want for my general computing. I want Intel and AMD to make their X86 processors efficient enough that we can have a fairly thin Windows based tablet, that is good for all day computing. Like 8 hours minimum, and I still think it will happen. They have a lot of really smart scientists and engineers working on it right now.

some_guy_said

“Like 8 hours minimum, and I still think it will happen”

We’ve already arrived there for full sized, full powered tablets/laptops.

I have a 1.9 pound i5 ATIV700, and there’s one or two others that make this range…like the acer iconia w700. Mine (The samsung) gets all day use for light/standard use. The Acer gets over 7 hours of use on battery rundown tests – Consistent, uninterrupted use.

They’re still expensive and rare, but we have already reached this point. In a few generations, what you want to see will be commonplace.

But it will still be difficult for intel and partners to get this to translate well to smaller mobile devices, without compromising (Atom) or possibly pursuing some kind of big/little strategy.

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